Testimony of Max Holland

Hearing of 10/11/94 -- Washington, DC.
Is Max Holland here?

Good afternoon, Mr. Holland, and welcome.

MR. HOLLAND: Good afternoon.

I am very pleased to have an opportunity to state my views with respect to the
question of what constitutes an assassination record. Before I give the
outlines of a definition I have tried to develop, I want to state clearly that
I subscribe to two premises about records pertaining to the assassination of
President Kennedy. The first is that the crime should not be divorced from
its overarching historical context, namely the Cold War. The foreign and
domestic Federal responses and decisions of any moment during the period 1946
to 1989 was affected by the Cold War mind-set and Cold War dictates, and I
believe that the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination was no exception.

My second premise follows directly from the first, a major, though not the
only reason why the public is confused and cynical is that the assassination
has been divorced from its context for more than 30 years. Highly pertinent
records have been segregated, kept secret primarily because of Cold War
exigencies. The public, quite naturally, but erroneously cannot square this
continued secrecy with government assurances that the essential truth about
the assassination has already been told.

The Federal government has made several attempts since the Warren Report's
publication to put the lingering controversy of the assassination to rest,
none of these efforts have succeeded, however, in large measure because the
same overriding geopolitical consideration, the Cold War, has always hampered
full disclosure. But now that the Cold War is over, many secrets need not be
kept any longer.

That profound fact along with the Review Board's extraordinary powers and
mandate present the Board with an extraordinary opportunity and
responsibility, how the Board chooses, therefore, to define an assassination
record is of the utmost importance.

Many of the elements in the proper definition are manifest, and it is truly
your task to develop an all-inclusive definition. At the risk of stating some
obvious considerations, I believe any definition of assassination record
should include these elements, all documents generated or received by each and
every Federal inquiry ever conducted into the events that began on November
22nd, starting with the FBI's initial investigation, then followed by the
Warren Commission, the panel set up by Ramsey Clarke, the Rockefeller
Commission, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, and finally the House
Assassinations Committee.

All documents in the possession of any Federal entity or office or State or
local law enforcement office that pertain to the events that began on November
22nd and were not transferred to the Warren Commission or subsequent inquiries
by the originating or recipient Federal, State or local entity. I will be
glad to clarify these if they seem a little inexact.

Third, all documents pertaining to covert and clandestine U.S. efforts to
depose or subvert Castro's regime from January 1960 to January 1969, including
proposed assassination plots.

Four, all documents that depict the response of the U.S. Government, and in
particular the measures taken by the national security apparatus, the
intelligence community and law enforcement agencies to the news from Dallas on
November 22nd.

Five, all pertinent documents about the assassination or its aftermath
contained in private personal papers of top Federal officials who played
leading roles in the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations or
participated in national security planning with respect to Cuba from 1960 to
1968, or were substantially involved with any one of the Federal inquiries
into the events that began on November 22nd.

The final category would be documents generated by foreign governments. In
particular, I think the important governments are the former Soviet Union,
Cuba and Mexico.

These five broad categories provide a rough definition, and perhaps it would
help the Review Board to understand my perspective if I provide some specific
example of records that fall under one or more of the categories established.

Under B, for example, records not provided to the Warren Commission, I would
include, for example, records possessed by the now defuncted House UnAmerican
Activities Committee, and the Senate Internal Security Committee as they
pertained to the assassination.

Under C, documents pertaining to subversion of Castro's regime, I would
specify records generated by the special group augmented in NSC Committee that
approved all covert and clandestine activities directed against Castro's
regime.

Under D, documents that pertain to the response of the U.S. Government after
the assassination, I would include these kinds of records, all relevant
records in the possession of the National Security Agency, including
communications intercepts conducted by it, other agencies of the U.S.
Government, or allied eavesdropping agencies in the wake of the assassination;
also all records generated by the Watch Committee, an interdepartmental group
which convened in the State Department immediately following news of the
assassination; also all records generated or received in the White House
situation room in the aftermath of the assassination; all records generated or
received in the National Command Center, the Department of Defense's military
nerve center after the assassination; and also something like transcripts of
the telephone calls that were made from Air Force One by President Johnson on
the return flight to Washington from Dallas.

Under E, which is personal, private papers, and this is a very naughty subject
because of the lack of clarity regarding an official's ability to take
government documents with him when he or she left public service, I think the
Board ought to at least approach and see if they are willing to cooperate
without any threat of subpoena to make sure that you get access to the papers
of Robert F. Kennedy; Douglas Dillon, who was Secretary of the Treasury;
Nicholas Katzenbach, who was Number 2 in the Department of Justice; George
Bundy, the National Security Advisor to President Kennedy; John McCone, the
Director of Central Intelligence; Allen Dulles, his predecessor; Richard
Helms, the Director of Clandestine Operations; and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
who was an aide in the White House.

Under F, which would be documents generated by foreign governments, obviously
the KGB files or any Soviet files on Oswald are of importance, although I
believe some of these were transferred, at least some part were transferred to
the State Department right after the assassination, and also any Mexican
Police or intelligence files about Oswald's trip to Mexico City, and naturally
any files that the Cuban government might want to make available.

Finally, I would strongly urge the Review Board, while fashioning its
definition of an assassination record, to consult two men who for slightly
different reasons are very familiar with the government documents. The first
would be David Belin, who was an assistant counsel on the Warren Commission,
and later the Executive Director of the Rockefeller Commission and, as such,
someone who has had unparalleled access to CIA records. The second man is Dr.
Alfred Goldberg who is a historian in the Air Force who was brought on the
Warren Commission by the Chief Justice to serve as a historical advisor. He
is now the Chief Historian in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the
Pentagon.

That concludes my presentation. I will be glad to answer any questions.

CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: Thank you, Mr. Holland.

Go ahead, Dr. Graff.

DR. GRAFF: Mr. Holland, is there some reason, or did I miss it, why you would
not have a survey of organized crime records? Is that because of your own
view of how the assassination was brought about?

MR. HOLLAND: Basically, I wouldn't be against it but I am not necessarily an
advocate of it.

DR. GRAFF: So we have heard this morning or this afternoon about the
possibility of a coup d'etat by the Joint Chiefs, although you mentioned some
Defense Department records, you would not specifically look in that category
that was mentioned by a previous witness?

MR. HOLLAND: When I mention top Defense Department records, I think it is
because it will lay some suspicions to rest to look at the reactions of
various agencies of the U.S. Government immediately after the assassination as
to whether this was a coup d'etat or whatever.

I mean, I don't believe it was, but it would be helpful to the historical
record for people to realize how the perception of what had happened first
manifested itself and then changed in the months following the assassination.

DR. GRAFF: I see. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: Go ahead, Dr. Hall.

DR. HALL: Mr. Holland, I am especially taken by your discussion of private
personal papers that were taken by public officials, and you indicated it was
a complex matter and it surely is.

I am wondering, however, if I can get you to speak a little bit more about the
conceptual, the philosophical issues that you see are presented by these
materials in the light of our command for public disclosure?

MR. HOLLAND: Well, there are probably lines that are going to have to be
drawn, but certainly I think the papers of Robert Kennedy are very
significant, primarily because of his unusual role during the Administration.
He was both the President's brother, closest advisor and very involved in
foreign policy issues, most notably the covert attempts to subvert Castro's
regime.

His papers are at the Kennedy Library. They have never really become part of
the assassination record. They have never really been investigated by any of
the Federal inquiries. It was just considered that the subject was so painful
that Robert Kennedy had no valuable information. I don't think that is
correct.

I think, if you look at his activities, it is sort of a Rosetta Stone in terms
of the Cold War context of this matter. So I think it is incumbent on the
Board to put his papers at a very high priority.

Does that answer your question?

DR. HALL: It certainly answers with regard to Robert Kennedy. I do think
that there is a nice issue here involving public access necessary to the
functioning of a democracy and the preservation and protection of private
property interest which can be seen as necessary to the functioning of a
democracy.

MR. HOLLAND: This is a very thorny legal issue and, of course, with
Presidents it only been settled very recently after President Nixon resigned,
they passed a law specifying exactly how a President's papers are disposed of.

With regard to other officials, in my own researches, I know someone like
Averell Harriman thought nothing of taking everything that came across his
desk that interested him, and his collection is huge, and it is a lot of
classified government documents. Now, at the time, there was nothing against
that in a legal sense and he did it. Other officials, when they walked out of
the Justice Department, or wherever, they left everything that came across
their desk.

So I think once you establish some priority, it would just behoove the Board
to voluntarily ask officials who may have acted in this way in an earlier time
to cooperate and volunteer documents.

DR. HALL: Certainly the relationship of the legal standard that we talked
about earlier to the historical standard is one that strikes me as pushing the
Committee or pushing the Board to give perhaps some greater credence,
exercising some fuller fidelity to the idea that the historical standard, that
is, we need the truth, ought to outweigh whatever the particular legal
standard may be.

MR. HOLLAND: I agree.

CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: And since historians outnumber lawyers on this Board.

Dr. Joyce, you have a question?

MR. JOYCE: Mr. Holland, throughout the hearing today there have been what
seem to me to be two threads that are not altogether mutually comfortable, one
being an advocating the Board to take a fairly systematic approach to
investigating the records in various and many government agencies, the other
being a menu of suggested priorities for looking here and there, asking very
specific questions of the records rather than undertaking any kind of
systematic survey of them.

I am wondering, given this broad dilemma that we face in terms of not only
defining a record but undertaking programs to systematically release as many
of them as possible, if you have any comment on the respective merits of these
two models that are posed for us, and what guidance you might have for us in
that regard?

MR. HOLLAND: Well, you have a Herculean task any way you look at it. I think
my bias would be to fully disclose records that were both provided to the
previous investigations were denied to those investigations by Federal
offices.

However, I do think you should seriously entertain leads that researchers who
are looking through the records that have been declassified give you, and you
have to start exercising your own judgment at some point because, obviously,
it is very conceivable that some of the Federal inquiries did not look into
things that they had no idea about, and that is clear about the Warren
Commission in the first instance.

So it is going to be a balancing test. Like I say, I think you have to treat
the records that are in existence already, which are massive, and then
supplement that by suggestions you get from the research community.

DR. NELSON: I have one. I actually wanted to return to the question of
private papers. It seems to me there are several categories here. Private
papers are not always personal papers is what you are saying and, of course,
we know anyone who has been to Presidential libraries knows that half of what
is there in personal collections are Federal records. In fact, it is illegal
to take out a record unless there is a copy left. So that seems to me it is a
fairly clear issue if there is a deed of gift, and if it is in a library, it
becomes a Federal record.

The problem rests with those documents that are in libraries but have not been
given as a deed of gift. Would you limit, and this I think is where you run
into legal problems, would you limit the Board to documents that appear to
be -- would you trust the person who had produced the documents to give you
what was, in fact, federally-related records? How would you differentiate
between it when asking them, for example? This is the thorniest issue of what
to do with these records and documents. It is not Joe Smith down the road, it
is someone who was very much involved but whose records we know exist but, in
fact, are not part of the Federal system yet.

MR. HOLLAND: I guess my answer would be conditional kind of depending on who
we are talking about. There are some officials, I think, I would push very
hard on, and others I would accept an assurance at face value that they have
looked through everything that is still held under the deed of gift out of the
archive, and have given us everything that is pertinent.

DR. NELSON: The second thing I would like to raise, because we have heard
this all day also and it is very important, is our need for foreign government
records, but one of the big problems we have here, one of the problems that
everyone has raised, is that there is a sense that not all the documents are
given when one asks. What do we do, how do we know, how complete can the
record ever be of foreign governments, especially given the fact that whatever
the grave deficiencies of our own system, it is the best around. Other
countries may not keep the records, really not keep them. This poses another
terrific problem to us. How do we handle that?

MR. HOLLAND: Well, I mean, I think the law makes some provision for the
Secretary of State to ask foreign governments, and I think in the end we are
just going to have to rely on their faith because you have no power to
subpoena their officials and verify that the documents are genuine or anything
else. You are just going to have to make and appeal.

DR. NELSON: I think it is worth putting that on the record because there is
only so much we can do outside our own borders.

MR. HOLLAND: Obviously Cuba may feel differently about the importance of
divulging everything than a government that doesn't even exist any more.